In front plane stacking or switch stacking, a plurality of physical switches are virtualized into one virtual switch. The use of front plane stacking generally provides a relatively high level of resiliency, scalability, and higher bandwidth than any of the individual physical switches may provide individually. In addition, front plane stacking supports the use of dedicated point-to-point Ethernet (e.g., copper or fiber) links to interconnect the physical switches. The dedicated point-to-point Ethernet links may carry data plane traffic and may also exchange control plane traffic. The interconnection of the physical switches through such links enables the front plane stacked physical switches to be assigned a single IP address and to appear to users as a single switch.